What It's Like Being Interviewed For A Job At Apple

In Pirates of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs tears into a potential Apple employee by asking him, “Are you a virgin?”The frightened interviewee stammers, intimidated by the question, but eventually says, “No.”

Jobs lays into him and says, “You’re still a virgin, you just think you’re not.”

Applying for a job at Apple today is unlikely to land you in a similar situation, since the company is much bigger and Jobs is no longer in the office on a day to day basis.

However, getting a job at Apple isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to have to answer highly technical questions, and talk about your personal life a little bit.

We flipped through Glassdoor.com’s big compilation of Apple interview questions to get an idea of what the process is like. We gathered some of the best questions asked across a few different positions at Apple.

You get 4-10 interviews that are each 30 minutes long at Apple's HQ

Similar to what happens at other places, when you're getting in-person interviews, 4-5 people meet with you for 30 minutes at a time. General questions include, why do you want to be at Apple, questions about your resume, and questions about your current work. More specific questions follow ...

When you're being grilled, these are the sorts of questions you can expect ...

This is a tough question. Apple doesn't want people to know what it's planning, so secrecy is key. The interviewee, responded by saying, 'I would deep dive internally first, understand the building blocks of the said technology, and pursue different outside vendors as required with sections of the technology in order to obfuscate the ultimate goal.'

This prospective engineer was asked to solve a problem: 'If vending machine takes 1$ bill and gives 75cens worth product. But it doesn't gives out change. How do you analyse what has gone wrong. You don't have any access to internals of the vending machine.'

S/he didn't give an answer to the problem, so if you have an idea, drop it in the comments.

Another example of a technical question.

The interviewee said s/he was just honest and said they didn't like the weather or the location.

We don't know how to do that, but if you're applying to be a Software engineer, you might want to know it.

This is out of our comfort zone, but someone on Glassdoor responded with this: 'You know n. S = n*(n+1)/2 is the sum of 1st n numbers. P = sum of the n+1 numbers you are provided with. Finding P given an array of n+1 integers can be done in O(n). P - S is the repeated integer.' Sound right?

Final piece of advice: You should know your Apple products well

On person was applying to be an analyst at Apple, and s/he wrote, 'My advice to candidates: know your apple products well, understand the company's position in the market place, write your resume from an Apple perspective ( all your mac os x, and mac software should be on there). Make sure the job is right for you too, don't get caught up in the fact that it's Apple.'

In case you've never seen it, here's the clip from Pirates Of Silicon Valley of Steve Jobs interviewing someone in the 80's. (We don't think this is what's it's like today ...)